8. _Prejudiced Arguments and Attempted Self-Defence._ The real weakness and shallowness of human nature is shown in this connexion in a way which is uncomplimentary to our intellectual pride. The saddest fact is, that it is always intensified in the person who would be counted above the average in intellectuality by a consensus of opinion. We are all well aware that such an one to win an argument will strain his statement of his facts in the direction he desires them. His reason is so dominated by his emotions and his sense appreciation (feeling-tones) that an appeal to the former is at first in vain. The majority of mankind has overcompensated in these directions, and it is for this reason that in the education and development of the child of to-day and the future, we must see to it that we relinquish all educational methods which tend to cultivate guidance and control through the emotions and the sensory appreciations (feeling-tones). Some perception of the evils that we have thus briefly summarised has been awakened in the minds of the more earnest thinkers during the last few years, and, as a result, the systems of exercises display a clearly marked tendency towards modification. They have lessened their muscle-tensing violence, and have become, and are becoming, ever less and less strenuous physical acts. Thus we find “physical culture” advocates who a few years ago insisted upon the use of dumb-bells, and in some cases dumb-bells increasing in weight over a graduated series of exercises, now emphasising the necessity for _gentle_ exercises without even mentioning the dumb-bell, which is perhaps as good a proof as any of the truth of my contentions. My next instance, namely, “relaxation,” is even less efficient. The usual procedure is to instruct the pupil, who is either sitting or lying on the floor, to relax, or to do what he or she understands by relaxing. The result is invariably collapse. For relaxation really means a due tension of the parts of the muscular system intended by nature to be constantly more or less tensed, together with a relaxation of those parts intended by nature to be more or less relaxed, a condition which is readily secured in practice by adopting what I have called in my other writings the position of mechanical advantage.[6] But apart from an incorrect understanding of the proper condition natural to the various muscles, the theory of relaxation, like that of the rest cure, makes a wrong assumption, and if either system is persisted in, there must inevitably follow a general lowering of vitality which will be felt the moment regular duties are taken up again, and which will soon bring about the return of the old troubles in an exaggerated form.